Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, to 1930

Demography and Alliances to 1916

The Middle East in the year 2000. Click to enlarge.

Jerusalem in the mid-19th century had a population that is said to have not exceeded 8,000. Jews were only about 5 percent of its population. Jewish migrants coming from Poland and Russia arrived in the 1880s, fleeing pogroms and harsh discrimination. Jews running from anti-Semitism also came from other countries. There were indigenous Jews in Palestine and Jews who had arrived three centuries earlier, from Spain and Persia. By around 1900 the Zionist movement in Europe was helping Jews establish agricultural communities in Palestine, while many Jewish immigrants preferred not to farm. By 1911 the Jews in Jerusalem numbered around 40,000, there were 9,000 Christians and 7,000 Muslims.

Jerusalem was the largest city in Palestine, with holy places for Jews, Christians and Muslims but little else to match its reputation. T E Lawrence (to be known as Lawrence of Arabia) was to describe it as a "dirty town." Its streets have been described as largely unpaved, crooked and blind alleys.

In Syria, the city of Damascus in 1911 had a population estimated to be between 154,000 and 225,000. Christians and Jews together numbered between 35,000 and 55,000.

Another relatively large city, in Mesopotamia, was Baghdad, a city that had declined over centuries from its high of around 1,000,000 inhabitants to a population in 1907 recorded as 185,000.

Also in what was still being described as Syria was Beirut with a 1911 population of around 120,000, with something like 77,000 Christians, 36,000 Muslims, 4,100 foreigners, 2,500 Jews and 400 Druses.

Farther south, in that part of Arabia known as the Hejaz along the coast of the Red Sea, was the smaller city of Medina, the "City of the Prophet," with a population in 1911 of between 15,000 and 20,000.

Farther south in the Hejaz was Mecca. It had a fixed population said to be between 50,000 and 60,000 in 1878. Its population included Muslims who were making their once in a lifetime pilgrimage – a city that had frequent cholera epidemics.

By far the largest cities in the entire area were Cairo, with 600,000 to 700,000 inhabitants, and Alexandria with close to 400,000.

From Palestine and Syria to as far south as Yemen, the Ottoman Empire ruled, and it ruled nominally in Egypt. Since 1882 the British had been in actual control of Egypt – seven years after Britons had purchased shares in the Suez Canal enterprise from the Ottoman Empire's viceroy in Egypt and had begun to control Egypt's finances.

Meanwhile there was not yet a Saudi Arabia. By 1912 its founder-to-be, Ibn Saud, had made himself a minor warlord in an area that measured 700 by 700 yards. He was allied with camel-riding Bedouin tribal warriors who adhered to a conservative Islam: Wahabism. With these tribesmen, Saud founded the Ikhwan, a military-religious brotherhood with the approval of local Salafi ulema. Saud also instituted an agrarian policy to settle the nomadic pastoralist bedouins into colonies, and to do this Saud made peace with the Ottoman Empire. He agreed not to have relations with any outside power and join Ottoman forces in resisting any aggressions.

More prestigious than Ibn Saud in Arabia was Hussein bin Ali, who ruled the Hejaz and also ruled as the Sharif of Mecca. He was of the Hashemite family that claimed direct descent from Muhammad the Prophet. The Hashemite family had ruled the Hejaz in unbroken succession since the year 1201.

Since 1839, there had been attempts by the Ottomans to modernize Arabia – a program called Tanzimat – a program continued by the revolutionaries who took power in 1908. The reforms attempted to integrate non-Muslims and non-Turks more thoroughly into Ottoman society by enhancing their civil liberties and granting them equality throughout the Empire.

The effort to integrate Turkey and Arabia was advanced by extending railways from Turkey. A railroad reached Jerusalem in 1892. The Hejaz railroad was begun in 1900 with the intention of running through Damascus, Medina and Mecca. And then there was the railway that was planned to reach Baghdad, a project funded and engineered mainly by Germans. The Turks wanted a rail line to Baghdad and the Germans wanted a transport connection to the Persian Gulf.

Against the integration were a few Western-educated Arab intellectuals and military officers who formed organizations supporting greater local autonomy in Arabia, and there were various tribes in Arabia who wanted to be left alone.

Then came the outbreak of war in August 1914. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), known collectively as the Young Turks, decided to enter the war on the side of Germany. The British responded in November by annexing Cyprus, and in December the British announced that Egypt was their protectorate. The pretense that it was still a part of the Ottoman Empire was dropped.

The British defeated a remnant Ottoman force at Basra near the Persian Gulf in December, and its wartime enemies responded by attacking the British as the Suez Canal, and an Ottoman force invaded Egypt but was repelled.

The British took serious steps to win allies among the Arabs, and they succeeded. Between July 1915 and March 1916 there was correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, and the ruler of the Hejaz and Mecca, Hussein bin Ali. Basically, the British promised Hussein that their success against the Ottoman Turks would leave people in Arabia independent, and Hussein agreed to an alliance with Britain against Ottoman rule.

The British were also talking to Ibn Saud, who had been harboring some dislike toward the Turks. Saud abandoned his agreements with the Ottomans and in December 1915 he signed a treaty of "friendship and cooperation" with the British, and from the British he began receiving monthly payments.

With the war and the alliances, the Middle East would never be the same.